Senior Embedded Applications Engineer, Edge AI Lab

Job Description

About the Role & The Reality AI Lab

The Renesas AIoT Center of Excellence in Columbia, MD (formerly Reality AI) is seeking a hands-on Senior Edge AI Applications Engineer to lead our physical lab setup, fabricate sensor prototyping rigs, and deploy low-power machine learning models directly onto microcontrollers (MCUs).

This is a physical, hardware-centric engineering role. You will work at the exact intersection of physical system fabrication, digital signal processing (DSP), C/C++ embedded firmware, and TinyML. You will physically instrument motor control setups, audio arrays, and vibration sensors, collect high-frequency time-series datasets off real physical targets, write DSP feature extraction, and compress ML models to run within kilobytes of RAM on Renesas MCUs.

What This Role IS NOT (Please Read Before Applying)

• This IS NOT a Cloud AI, NLP, or LLM Role: If your primary experience is with Lang Chain, PySpark, RAG pipelines, or fine-tuning Large Language Models in the cloud, this role is not a fit.
• This IS NOT a Remote Software Position: You will be physically building rigs, soldering, testing hardware with oscilloscopes, and working in our dedicated Columbia, MD lab 100% onsite.

Key Responsibilities

• Physical Prototyping & Lab Management: Hands-on fabrication of physical prototype rigs, custom sensor arrays, and 3D-printed enclosures to capture real-world physical phenomena.
• High-Frequency Sensor Data Acquisition: Instrument physical setups (motors, HVAC, industrial machines, automotive targets) to capture, clean, and preprocess high-frequency time-series datasets (accelerometers, acoustic, electrical, current/voltage).
• TinyML & On-Device Model Deployment: Train, quantize (INT8/FP16), and deploy tiny machine learning models onto microcontrollers (ARM Cortex-M, Renesas RA/RX/RL78) using Tensor Flow Lite for Microcontrollers, CMSIS-NN, or eIQ.
• Digital Signal Processing (DSP): Apply DSP feature extraction (FFT, spectrograms, windowing, bandpass filtering, time-domain features) to feed edge inference pipelines.
• Embedded Firmware & Driver Development: Write C/C++ code, bare-metal or RTOS drivers (FreeRTOS, Zephyr), and handle low-level communication (SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, DMA).
• Technical Leadership: Lead junior lab engineers, manage physical lab setups, and collaborate cross-functionally with product and systems teams.

• Education: B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Applied Physics, or a related technical field.
• Experience: 3+ years of hands-on experience in embedded systems, hardware prototyping, and deploying edge ML/DSP algorithms onto physical hardware targets.
• Hardware & Prototyping
  
  Skills:
  
  Proven experience with physical assembly, bread boarding, soldering, 3D printing, schematic reading, and bench debugging using JTAG/SWD, oscilloscopes, and logic analyzers.
• Signal Processing (DSP): Demonstrated fluency in time-series and audio signal processing (spectral analysis, filtering, feature extraction in Python/MATLAB).
• Firmware & Embedded C/C++: Hands-on C/C++ programming for MCUs, RTOS task management, DMA queues, and low-level peripheral drivers.
• On-Device ML: Practical experience with TinyML frameworks (Tensor Flow Lite Micro, CMSIS-NN, Edge Impulse) and model quantization/compression for constrained MCU targets.

Renesas is one of the top global semiconductor companies in the world. We strive to develop a safer, healthier, greener, and smarter world, and our goal is to make every endpoint intelligent by offering product solutions in the automotive, industrial, infrastructure and IoT markets. Our robust product portfolio includes world leading MCUs, SoCs, Analog and power products, plus Winning Combination solutions…